Read Online The Living Will Envy The Dead by Christopher Nuttall - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Christopher Nuttall
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and I had quickly learned to isolate the dangerous ones from the sheep who had been herded into battle at gunpoint. It wasn't that difficult. The sheep sat around, grateful beyond words that they hadn’t been shot out of hand, while the dangerous ones sought to cause trouble. The new Iraqi Government had had a very simple way of dealing with such bastards. They took them to special camps outside the cities and shot them, burying them far from their homes and families. It was a lesson I had taken to heart.
And I was sure that I could trust the guards and their instincts more than I could trust what any bleeding heart social worker had written. The average prisoner is no master-brain, but many of them, including David Apple, are damn good at working the system. They seek to convince good-hearted people that they have reformed, that they’re no longer a threat to society, that they have ‘rights’ that we should honour…and far too many of them fall for it. I understand the impulse to do good, or to believe the best of people, but sometimes they take it too far. Where does the blame lie, I ask you, if the convicted murderer is released to murder again?
And rights? A person is born with rights, but as far as I am concerned, they’re rights that can be forfeited. Who says that the ‘rights’ of a murderer are more important than those of his victims? What ‘right’ does a rape victim have to be raped? She’s the victim . Why should she be punished by watching her tormentor go free? It might be nice to see the world through rose-tinted lenses, but it was not a delusion that I was prepared to embrace. The vast majority of the prisoners deserved to spend the rest of their lives behind bars, if not a final appointment with the executioner.
The guards, I suspected, privately agreed. They saw the prisoners all the time, watching them carefully, always knowing that one misstep could prove fatal. Their testimony should have meant more than the psychologists hired by the defence lawyers who – of course – testified that the defendant was mentally unbalanced, as opposed to outright evil. The guards were mainly male, as I had expected, but a handful of them were female, one of which had a nasty scar across her face. The turnover of female guards was high, or so I’d been told; they seemed to be challenged more than their male counterparts. The prison was not a place for the politically correct.
“All right,” I said, as calmly as I could. “This is what we are going to do.”
Richard’s list was a little on the optimistic side, as far as I was concerned, but I trusted his judgement. The first list, the men who needed drugs to survive, was the longest. It actually included several names that should also have been on the second list. The second list was slightly shorter, but between them they included nearly two thirds of the prison’s entire population. Desperate men, criminals all, who could not be released to add to the chaos. I didn’t dare take that risk…
And so we poisoned them.
It was simple enough. The prisoners often had different diets – the influence of the do-gooders again – and it was easy enough to ensure that the worst of the prisoners received the poisoned food. There were a handful of complaints about the quality of the food, but they were ignored and pretty soon the convicts were dying. The prison had stored enough concentrated poison to exterminate a small town reasonably painlessly – or so they claimed, but I don’t know for sure – and we watched them die. A handful of guards and a third of the Posse refused to watch, but the others, mainly veterans themselves, watched dispassionately. The remainder of the prisoners, the ones we had spared, stared in horror. They were used to being treated with kid gloves, by guards who feared being sued; they had never expected a massacre. The shock would do
And I was sure that I could trust the guards and their instincts more than I could trust what any bleeding heart social worker had written. The average prisoner is no master-brain, but many of them, including David Apple, are damn good at working the system. They seek to convince good-hearted people that they have reformed, that they’re no longer a threat to society, that they have ‘rights’ that we should honour…and far too many of them fall for it. I understand the impulse to do good, or to believe the best of people, but sometimes they take it too far. Where does the blame lie, I ask you, if the convicted murderer is released to murder again?
And rights? A person is born with rights, but as far as I am concerned, they’re rights that can be forfeited. Who says that the ‘rights’ of a murderer are more important than those of his victims? What ‘right’ does a rape victim have to be raped? She’s the victim . Why should she be punished by watching her tormentor go free? It might be nice to see the world through rose-tinted lenses, but it was not a delusion that I was prepared to embrace. The vast majority of the prisoners deserved to spend the rest of their lives behind bars, if not a final appointment with the executioner.
The guards, I suspected, privately agreed. They saw the prisoners all the time, watching them carefully, always knowing that one misstep could prove fatal. Their testimony should have meant more than the psychologists hired by the defence lawyers who – of course – testified that the defendant was mentally unbalanced, as opposed to outright evil. The guards were mainly male, as I had expected, but a handful of them were female, one of which had a nasty scar across her face. The turnover of female guards was high, or so I’d been told; they seemed to be challenged more than their male counterparts. The prison was not a place for the politically correct.
“All right,” I said, as calmly as I could. “This is what we are going to do.”
Richard’s list was a little on the optimistic side, as far as I was concerned, but I trusted his judgement. The first list, the men who needed drugs to survive, was the longest. It actually included several names that should also have been on the second list. The second list was slightly shorter, but between them they included nearly two thirds of the prison’s entire population. Desperate men, criminals all, who could not be released to add to the chaos. I didn’t dare take that risk…
And so we poisoned them.
It was simple enough. The prisoners often had different diets – the influence of the do-gooders again – and it was easy enough to ensure that the worst of the prisoners received the poisoned food. There were a handful of complaints about the quality of the food, but they were ignored and pretty soon the convicts were dying. The prison had stored enough concentrated poison to exterminate a small town reasonably painlessly – or so they claimed, but I don’t know for sure – and we watched them die. A handful of guards and a third of the Posse refused to watch, but the others, mainly veterans themselves, watched dispassionately. The remainder of the prisoners, the ones we had spared, stared in horror. They were used to being treated with kid gloves, by guards who feared being sued; they had never expected a massacre. The shock would do
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